1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to control of application sessions, and more specifically, to suspending an active application session for an initial user on a computing device to establish a secondary application session for another user on that same computing device for the same application.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Computing devices have become commonplace, and have created a market for applications that are installed and executed on these computing devices. The computing devices include, for example, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other portable computing devices; desktops; etc. The applications typically require a user to create a user account to enable the applications to be utilized. Many applications are emerging in the marketplace with each application offering different benefits. Although a user may have a user account for an application, the user may not have access to their computing device at a particular time in order to access the application at that time.
In some cases, the user may have access to a computing device of another person. This may occur when the user is with another person and desires to use the computing device of the other person to perform a simple operation within an application. For example, when using a review tool for source code, a user may receive a review comment while discussing the source code at a location of another person within a workplace. In order to reply to the comment, the user returns to a location of their computing device in the workplace to access the review tool.
In another example, a user may be shopping in a supermarket and become aware of a discount of 15% by paying bills through a payment application. Although the user has a user account for the payment application, the payment application is not installed on a mobile computing device of the user, such as a smartphone, etc. Although the user may install the payment application in order to receive the discount, this approach requires Internet connectivity in order to install the payment application on the user mobile computing device and receive the discount. If the payment application is not able to be installed on the user mobile computing device, the user cannot receive the discount. For example, the application may not be able to be installed when no mobile data is left on the user plan, no Wi-Fi connectivity is available, a mobile storage issue arises, etc.
Alternatively, the user may attempt to use a computing device of another person. For example, a person standing in a checkout line next to the user in the supermarket may have the payment application installed on their mobile computing device. In this case, the person exits their user account to enable the user to use the mobile computing device of the person to access (or log in to) the payment application through a corresponding account of the user and retrieve the discount. However, this approach is a time consuming and tedious procedure, and raises security issues due to the use of the mobile computing device by an unknown user.